Neopixel library too slow?

The shape of the Digital Rothko splotches are just not fading in fast enough and things seem to really slow down in the IDE’s serial monitor. This is after I simplified the number of operations as much as possible by re-orienting them from the drawcirclemaster, drawcircle and circle functions. So then I just did basic shapes: two rectangles and four lines — should be faster, right? WRONG.

It’s simply too slow. It’s like the time it takes to do all those setPixelColor is too slow. Going to look into the FastLED Library now and see if I can build the sketch that I showed at the ITP Spring Show from it, stat.